BAGHDAD — Five senior Islamic State officials have been captured, including a top aide to the group’s leader, in a complex cross-border sting carried out by Iraqi and American intelligence, two Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

The three-month operation, which tracked a group of senior Islamic State leaders who had been hiding in Syria and Turkey, represents a significant intelligence victory for the American-led coalition fighting the extremist group and underscores the strengthening relationship between Washington and Baghdad. Two Iraqi intelligence officials said those captured included four Iraqis and one Syrian whose responsibilities included governing the Islamic State’s territory around Deir al-Zour, Syria, directing internal security and running the administrative body that oversees religious rulings.

Iraq’s external intelligence agency published a statement confirming the arrests, but did not mention any details of the role played by the Americans or the Turks. The two Iraqi intelligence officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that had not been made public.

Turkey did not immediately comment on the operation. The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

The developments quickly took over many Iraqi news broadcasts on Wednesday night, with news anchors praising Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for what the intelligence service called a “major victory.” The news came at an opportune time for Mr. Abadi, who faces a tight parliamentary race on Saturday.

The two Iraqi officials said that they had been tracking several of their targets for months, but the breakthrough came at the start of the year.

An Iraqi intelligence unit responsible for undercover missions had tracked an Iraqi man, Ismail Alwaan al-Ithawi, known by the nom de guerre Abu Zeid al-Iraqi, from Syria to the Turkish city of Sakarya, about 100 miles east of Istanbul, these officials said.

Mr. Ithawi, described by the Iraqis as a top aide to the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, had been in charge of fatwas, or religious rulings, in the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate. He was also in charge of the education curriculum, and was a member of the body that appointed security and administrative leaders for the Islamic State’s territory, which had included large parts of Iraq and Syria.

He had been living in Turkey with his Syrian wife under his brother’s identity, one of these officials said.

The Iraqis sent the Turks an intelligence file they had amassed on Mr. Ithawi, and the Turkish security forces arrested him on Feb. 15, and extradited him to Iraq, this official said.

Iraqi and American intelligence officials then spent weeks interrogating him, learning the details and whereabouts of other ISIS leaders in hiding, the officials said.

The American-led coalition used this information to launch an airstrike in mid-April that killed 39 suspected Islamic State members near Hajin, in the Deir al-Zour district of Syria, the second official said.

The joint Iraqi-American intelligence team then set a trap, according to these officials. They persuaded Mr. Ithawi to contact several of his Islamic State colleagues who had been hiding in Syria and lure them across the border, the officials said.

The Iraqi authorities were waiting, and arrested the group soon after they crossed the frontier, the officials said.

Those arrested included Saddam al-Jammel, a Syrian who had been the head of the Islamic State territory around Deir al-Zour, and Abu Abdel al-Haq, an Iraqi who had been the head of internal security for the group. Two other Iraqis were also arrested, the officials said.

Iraq’s state television broadcast images of four of the detainees. Wearing yellow prisoner jumpsuits, the men, some with long beards and some clean-shaven, explained in short statements their responsibilities in the Islamic State. Each appeared to be in good health.

It was unclear where they were being held or whether they had been given access to a lawyer.

Turkey made no public comment on the arrests, but frequently announces arrests of Islamic State suspects in Turkish cities. Last week, Turkish news media reported the capture of three people in Sakarya who were accused of being members of the Islamic State. The reports said one of the three was the group’s leader in Deir al-Zour.

It is not known if those arrests were related to the arrest of Mr. Ithawi.

Relations have been strained between Turkey and the United States recently, in particular over American support for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

But counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries remains close. Turkey, which was criticized for allowing jihadists from all over the world open access to Syria in the early years of the Syrian war, has closed its border and rounded up hundreds of suspected Islamic State members in Turkey over the past two years.

Aviation experts believe they have unraveled the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. During Sunday's episode of Australian current affairs program 60 Minutes, a panel of experts claimed the plane's pilot Captain Zaharie Amad Shah deliberately crashed the jet in the Indian Ocean as part of his "murder-suicide" plan.

According to Larry Vance, a former senior investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Zaharie executed a careful series of maneuvers across Thailand and Malaysia to evade detection.

The pilot “was killing himself” and took the plane to the most remote spot he could in the southern Indian Ocean so it would “disappear,” experts said. The panel also included renowned aviation safety expert Captain John Cox and Martin Dolan, who was Chief Commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau when Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014.

“This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time,” Dolan said.

Dolan and the experts' claims came just days after John Dawson, a lawyer who represented nine families from MH370 and MH17, told News Corp Australia: “In MH370, you have the pilot flying between Malaysia and Beijing who turns back the aircraft. The evidence is so heavily weighted to involvement by one of the aircrew taking this aircraft down... That aircraft has probably depressurized, the people died of asphyxiation, it was premeditated murder."

Explaining the reason about Zaharie's alleged attempt to avoid detection by flying a course along the border between Malaysian and Thai air space, Simon Hardy said this was done "so both of the controllers aren’t bothered about this mysterious aircraft. Cause it’s, ‘Oh, it's gone. It’s not in our space any more’.”

Flight MH370 went missing in 2014 with 239 people on board while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A multimillion-dollar search failed to yield concrete clues as to the plane's whereabouts. Currently, a U.S. company named Ocean Infinity is searching for the jetliner, under a "no cure, no fee" structure.

Since the plane went missing, several conspiracy theories emerged about the fate of the doomed jet. Most recently, an Australian mechanical engineer and crash investigator claimed MH370 was found with "bullet holes." This claim was made based on Google Earth images purporting to shows the missing jetliner in the water 10 miles south of Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean where the plane debris had earlier washed up.

However, authorities rejected the claims saying no such finding was made.

The latest comments from the experts are not the first time doubts were raised about the plane's pilot's involvement in the tragedy. In 2016, reports surfaced alleging the pilot of the missing Boeing 777-200 took the plane on a premeditated suicidal flight, giving rise to the "death dive" theory.

An investigation was launched after New York Magazine reported Zaharie performed a simulated flight on his extensive home-built flight simulator that mirrored MH370's known flight path and ended with a crash in the Indian Ocean.

But, authorities investigating the disappearance of Flight MH370 did not confirm the theory.

The death-dive theory isn't the only one that made the rounds when Flight MH370 went missing. Other theories included claims of the plane being hijacked and crashed into sea.

Multiple theorists also claimed Flight MH370 was shot down by military forces. While some claimed the plane was accidentally shot down during a joint U.S.-Thai military exercise, others blamed North Korea of doing so.

Some reports claimed a possible electrical issue resulted in a fire on board the plane. Due to this the crew allegedly passed out from smoke inhalation, and the plane continued on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

A progressive young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a bike trip around the world.

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, who were both in their late 20s, quit their jobs in 2017 to embark on a trip around the world. Austin, a vegan, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian, decided that they're were wasting their lives working.

"I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote on his blog before he quit. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”

The couple documented their year-long journey on social media until it came to a tragic and gruesome end in Tajikistan, a country with a known terrorist presence.

Austin and Geoghegan were riding their bikes in the country on July 29 when they were rammed by a car, according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed them to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.

Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the black ISIS flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill "disbelievers," according to The New York Times.

Austin and Geoghegan were riding their bikes in the country on July 29 when they were rammed by a car, according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed them to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A U.S. strike over the weekend killed a senior Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) commander in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan and U.S. officials said Monday. The strike in Nangarhar province killed Abu Sayeed Orakzai, a senior leader in the extremist group, according to Shah Hussain Martazawi, deputy spokesman for the Afghan presidency. He said the operation showed the government's "determination to fight terrorism."

Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said American forces launched a counterterrorism strike in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday that targeted a "senior leader of a designated terrorist organization." He did not provide further details.

"These efforts target the real enemies of Afghanistan, the same enemies who threaten America," he said.

"We have won against ISIS. We have beaten them and we have beaten them badly... We won" [list=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075528854402256896]Link[/list]

"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Link

Eh, you forgot to quote Iraq’s Prime Minister as well, and a host of other world leaders, generals, soldiers, journalists, and media outlets on the ground who agree that ISIS has been defeated and just a shadow of what it was.

The war against ISIS, for all intents and purposes, has been won. Insurgants remain, as expected, but they no longer have ‘control’ of cities in Iraq or the Syrian border.

No doubt, Jihadists will always be out there looking to kill Americans. And some may do it in the name of ISIS.. But they, as a controlling caliphate, are no more.

Now stop your trolling and go back to listening to your police scanner.

"We have won against ISIS. We have beaten them and we have beaten them badly... We won" [list=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075528854402256896]Link[/list]

"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Link

Eh, you forgot to quote Iraq’s Prime Minister as well, and a host of other world leaders, generals, soldiers, journalists, and media outlets on the ground who agree that ISIS has been defeated and just a shadow of what it was.

The war against ISIS, for all intents and purposes, has been won. Insurgants remain, as expected, but they no longer have ‘control’ of cities in Iraq or the Syrian border.

No doubt, Jihadists will always be out there looking to kill Americans. And some may do it in the name of ISIS.. But they, as a controlling caliphate, are no more.

Now stop your trolling and go back to listening to your police scanner.

That can change in a second. Picture the thousands of little towns in Iran and there leader says - ok who want to go be ISIS in Syria.

RedLeader wrote:Eh, you forgot to quote Iraq’s Prime Minister as well, and a host of other world leaders, generals, soldiers, journalists, and media outlets on the ground who agree that ISIS has been defeated and just a shadow of what it was.

The war against ISIS, for all intents and purposes, has been won. Insurgants remain, as expected, but they no longer have ‘control’ of cities in Iraq or the Syrian border.

No doubt, Jihadists will always be out there looking to kill Americans. And some may do it in the name of ISIS.. But they, as a controlling caliphate, are no more.

Now stop your trolling and go back to listening to your police scanner.

That can change in a second. Picture the thousands of little towns in Iran and there leader says - ok who want to go be ISIS in Syria.

FIFTEEN THOUSAND SMALL TOWN IRANIANS IN A CARAVAN HEADING TO THE BORDER!